"the question that drew Boo to Annawadi in the first place wasn’t so much 'How can we, the rich, allow this to continue?' as 'Why do they, the poor, put up with it?' They needn’t: the poor outnumber the rich in Mumbai and many other of the world’s metropolises, and they could scare the rich much more than they do. As Boo asks, 'Why don’t places like Airport Road, with their cheek-by-jowl slums and luxury hotels, look like the insurrectionist video game Metal Slug 3? Why don’t more of our unequal societies implode?'

What she discovered was that, though the poor might complain about the greed and self-interest of the rich, they complained about their neighbors much more. Poor individuals blamed other poor individuals for their predicament rather than expressing solidarity and taking their protests to the streets. As group identities based on caste, religion, and language began to wither, 'anger and hope was being privatized, like so much else in Mumbai.' And not just in Mumbai, but also in Nairobi, Santiago, Washington, and New York.

In the age of global market capitalism, hopes and grievances were narrowly conceived, which blunted a sense of common predicament. Poor people didn’t unite; they competed ferociously amongst themselves for gains as slender as they were provisional. And this undercity strife created only the faintest ripple in the fabric of the society at large. The gates of the rich, occasionally rattled, remained unbreached. The politicians held forth on the middle class. The poor took down one another, and the world’s great, unequal cities soldiered on in relative peace."